Monthly

Son of a trick ass bitch, I am here at the Silver Airways ticketing booth, trying to get to Key West, and as it turns out my reservation was made for P Perhach, not Paulette Perhach. Win: I was at the airport two hours early. Lose: The ticket agent told me that it will take 24 hours to re-issue my flight, It’s nearing an hour before the flight, and the last hour that I was supposed to spend giving my mom my full attention at a nice meal is spent with both of us on the phone, me snapping at her out of panic, and a Category 5 storm of self-hatred brewing in my chest.

You dumb fucking…

When are you ever going to learn to…

This is why you’ll never…

And I was feeling so good too, after a few days of hustling and networking at the writer’s conference here in Tampa. I’d met my goals, met 5 possible people who could license my writer’s kit, and an editor of Poets & Writers who offered me to send in a chapter of my writing book for her to review as a possible contribution to the magazine.

I’m so glad this writing thing is working out, because I’m terrible at everything else. This whole issue, all the stress, the time, the cost, is because I didn’t check carefully when booking my ticket. Sigh. I accept this wild creative mind. It is not always the easiest thing to go through the world with.

In our first talk, Amanda and I go through my family history with money. It wasn’t just that lost things. It was that it all felt so scary.

It wasn’t just downgrading cars, If was the fear of not knowing when the losing would stop. It was the chaos, knowing my parents were shielding me from something, but not knowing exactly what that something was. The monster in the fog is scarier than the monster out in the open.

Something was making my mom cry. Something was eating up our freedom to do things. Something was lurking, always, in the way she sent me away from the cash register. I know now it was called bankruptcy.

To do this assignment, I called my mom and my dad’s brother and one of his sisters.

A few Thanksgivings ago, my aunt told me a story about her grandmother. She had gotten on a train to the boat to America at 16, with her three other sisters. As they pulled away, she saw her mother running after the train.

“And that was the last time she saw her mother,” my aunt said.

I learned, by calling up and asking, what the opportunities of my life were built on. This mother’s pain. My great grandparents planting seeds and taking in boarders. My grandfather leaving for work, not letting the fact that he was vomiting sick get in the way.

Both sets of my grandparents lived through the Depression. Both my parents’ families struggled and sacrificed to give their kids better opportunities, so they could give their kids better opportunities. I am those kids. To squander those opportunities, because, oh, you know, lattes, is to spit on the work of generations.

I have always maintained that frugal is an ugly word. It sounds like something your old aunt’s foot cream is supposed to cure. But I know an even uglier word: wasteful. I feel wasteful of the opportunities I’ve been given. Wasteful of the gifts wrenched from the bodies of my… what… ancestors?

We don’t say that word much in American culture. Forefathers, sure, but that’s like Benjamin Franklin. We all have the same ones.

Unlike in other cultures, I don’t feel my ancestors can see me. I don’t talk to them. I don’t have traditions to honor them. In short, my life has never been set up in a way to take their perspective into account, to look at myself through their eyes.

I often think about the aliens in The Slaughterhouse Five, how they could see all time at once. Imagine, a faded, translucent grandmother, washing clothes by hand, passing through me, a faded, translucent girl, lying on the couch, saying, “Let’s just order in, it’s raining.”